MAMEWorld Forums - News

> Wow. I'm the bad guy now? I didn't "disappear" to anywhere. Piss and moan? That's how
> you see this? Everyone (literally, 2 people) were involved, Me and Aaron Giles. There
> is no excuse for this to have been leaked.

People pop up and offer data with strings attached with a relatively high level of frequency. Sometimes those people stay in contact. Sometimes they don't. It's hard to gauge whether to keep something secret or whether to make it public, because at any given point it could be that the person who was offering some data set as a lure ends up biting the dust.

> I explicitly told Aaron not to share the ROMs and I wanted to release these when I
> was ready. He fully agreed.

He probably did, but that was something that wasn't communicated explicitly to the broader MAME team as a whole. Aaron departed the project about a year ago, you're relying on an agreement that was more or less kept secret from everyone, with all of the liabilities that that entails. I'll get into this later in my post.

> Then, He shared them with Phil and never bothering to contact me, nor did Phil. He
> claims he "lost" my email, but he didn't contact me here either. I mean, how do you
> lose an email? Also, he is a dev that worked at Microsoft. Not sure how that is even
> possible.

How *what* is possible? That Aaron works at Microsoft? That Phil wasn't aware of the private agreements that Aaron arranged with you? You literally came to the MAME team offering some secretive ROM dump, which requires secrecy, while also having uploaded it to an archive that anyone can access. That aspect is certainly on the team as a whole for not making it clear who would have access to it, but in the same breath, you're also excoriating people for not upholding the same level of secrecy that you had privately agreed on while communicating nothing to the wider spectrum of MAME developers.

If there's anyone at fault here, it's Aaron, because he had you upload that dump to the same endpoint as anyone else, while engaging in these behind-the-veil shenanigans. If you have any ire, direct it at him. It's not anyone's fault but his own that the ROM dump was made public at all.

I have, in my own possession, some ROM dumps that were requested to be kept private, related to N64-as-arcade hardware. I've kept that dump secret, and so have the other developers that that dump was shared with. There's no risk of that dump becoming public, because none of us have ever shared it with anyone. The fact that you uploaded the dump of Danger Express to the shared FTP for MAME developers at Aaron's behest isn't a reflection on anyone but Aaron.

> Then it gets released, and then taken out. Now it's back in. Like, how was this even
> possible?

Probably by virtue of the fact that you went silent for literally 3 years. Look, no offense, but most of the people involved in arcade preservation are old as hell. Is everyone supposed to just eternally assume that the person who sourced a given ROM dump is always alive? You were incommunicado for 3 years, dude.

> I think you ("R"? these handles are confusing) reach out to me in email, and we went
> over all of this and also had an agreement about how I wanted to release these ROMs
> and you also were nice about it and agreed. I was unaware you weren't with the
> project anymore when I contacted you again, wondering what the hell was going on with
> DE again.
>
> I never ever said it was ok to release DE in any shape or form.

Yes! I think that this whole situation is stupid. The MAME team has an extensive history of respecting the wishes of people who dumped prototypes, and shared those dumps with certain restrictions, and who maintain some level of communication with the team.

Danger Express was originally added to MAME purely out of a mistake, because one developer wasn't aware of the restrictions were placed on that set, which most likely shouldn't have been uploaded to the common MAME FTP in the first place. The fact that it was isn't on you, but it absolutely is on the person who told you to do so, which seems to be Aaron, the person you're giving so much deference.

He made a stupid decision and it seems like we're all now paying for it. At least have the presence of mind to save your ire for who kicked off this whole shit-show.

When push comes to shove, the majority of the MAME team is always willing to play ball. I willingly departed from the core team in early 2021 but am still keenly aware that most of the people on the team have some level of involvement with software development as a profession. It would be stupid to actively burn bridges with people. Nobody did that, and nobody wants to do that.

What this comes down to is a fault in communication. For all anyone knew until you popped up out of nowhere, you might as well have been dead. Had this whole situation been handled with an appropriate level of guarded-ness, then Danger Express never would have made it into the wild in the first place.

But it did, and the reality is that having a prototype game "in the wild" doesn't impinge on the resale value of a board at all. If anything, the community is *more* willing, not *less* willing, to a pay a premium to have the physical article in hand.

If you really care about arcade preservation, if you really want to burgeon the resale value of your boards, then ensure that as many people as possible can take a stab at the games beforehand, and that means getting them into MAME.

You're not wrong for being angry that things have gone sideways because of Aaron's own fucked handling of things, but given that Aaron isn't even part of the project anymore, you need to refocus your ire.